Who I am and where I came from

I grew up in a small farm town near UC Davis. When I was about three I watched a PBS Nature program called “Incredible Suckers” on cephalopods and decided then and there that I wanted to study squid when I grew up. As I learned more, my interests broadened to math and science in general (although I still love squid!). I attended UC Santa Cruz, and while I toyed with the idea of majoring in math, I ultimately majored in biology with a minor in applied math and statistics.
When I graduated in 2014, I joined Carlos Garza’s lab as one of his three full time lab staff. I attended Eric’s version of this class two years ago and found it super interesting and incredibly helpful for honing my UNIX/terminal and R skills and getting a deeper understanding of our sequencing processing pipeline.

When I’m not working, I love to:

  1. Bake whatever interesting new food experiments I can find
  2. Brew beers, ciders, and mead with Akshar
  3. Go hiking!
  4. Knit

Here’s a picture of my adorable cat, since apparently the only photos I have on my computer right now are of her

Research Interests

Brief description of your research interests.

Influential papers

Describe two papers that have been very influential in your research. The main purpose of this is learning how to cite literature in RMarkdown. You will have to add the citations to references.bib in BibTeX format, and then also cite them.

An easy way to get the paper in BibTeX format is to find it on Google Scholar. Then, under the paper’s link, click on the big fat quotation marks, and then choose the BibTex link at the bottom of the page. Then copy the contents into references.bib. For example you might paste this into references.bib.

@article{richardson1997bayesian,
  title={On Bayesian analysis of mixtures with an unknown number of components (with discussion)},
  author={Richardson, Sylvia and Green, Peter J},
  journal={Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: series B (statistical methodology)},
  volume={59},
  number={4},
  pages={731--792},
  year={1997},
  publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}

Note the string before the comma on the first line. That is the cite key. Once you have done that, you can cite it by including @richardson1997bayesian if you don’t want the name in parenthesis, like, “As Richardson and Green (1997) introduced in their landmark paper.” On the other hand, you can use [@richardson1997bayesian] if you do want it all in parentheses, like, “Reversible jump MCMC has been previously applied to the analysis of mixtures (Richardson and Green 1997).”

The mathematics behind my research

It is easy to write complex mathematics using a mathematical typesetting engine called TeX. Write two displayed equations that are relevant to your work. For a quick primer on TeX and LaTeX you can download this cheatsheet and then fiddle with including things between the double dollar signs below: \[ \cos\theta + i\sin\theta = e^{i\theta} \] or here: \[ \lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n X_i = EX \]

My computing experience

Describe any experience you have with any programming languages. Include a snippet of code in two different languages using a non-evaluated code block. This can be something you have previously written, or, if you don’t have any, then find and copy a few lines of code off the web.

What I hope to get out of this class

Give me a bullet list of three things:

  • This
  • That
  • Another

Evaluating some R code

Here, please evaluate some R code to make a plot or a figure. The goal here is just to realize that you can imbed R code within fenced code blocks and get the output rendered into the document.

Citations

Richardson, Sylvia, and Peter J Green. 1997. “On Bayesian Analysis of Mixtures with an Unknown Number of Components (with Discussion).” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 59 (4): 731–92.